


Not quite sleeping beauty

by tocourtdisaster



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 11:48:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17263664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tocourtdisaster/pseuds/tocourtdisaster
Summary: Four times Bucky wakes up in Wakanda.





	Not quite sleeping beauty

**Author's Note:**

> No spoilers for Endgame, only minor spoilers for Infinity War.

He wakes up.

   
That's… unexpected.

   
He knows there's no way to get rid of his triggers; they're too deeply burned into his brain after decades of repeated use. He knew that going into cryo and he had firmly believed that he wasn't going to be coming out again, but apparently the Wakandan scientists never got that memo.

   
Hydra never broke something unless they broke it irrevocably. That was a lesson Bucky had learned for the first time nearly seventy-five years ago, and one that he had continued to learn through his years of activation.

 

But maybe Hydra had made a mistake. He wouldn't be awake otherwise.

 

There's a first time for everything, he supposes.

 

He's currently lying on his back, head inclined slightly, arm by his side, unrestrained. Hospital then, not a lab, or at least not the kind of lab that he's used to. That's promising.

 

"Ah, he's awake!"

 

Someone grabs his wrist and Bucky reacts without thought. He's been awake for possibly a minute, thawed but unconscious for an unknown amount of time, so when he tries to roll out of the bed and flip his attacker over his shoulder, he somehow finds himself on his ass looking straight down the barrel of some sort of energy weapon in no time flat.

 

"I told you not to touch Sergeant Barnes without his consent," T'Challa says. He sounds amused. When Bucky manages to locate the man behind his attacker, he looks amused too. "Perhaps you should help him up now?"

 

Bucky finally looks to the person holding him at gunpoint and at first thinks he must be hallucinating. It's a girl, a teenager, one hand encased in some sort of gauntlet and pointing a deadly weapon directly at his face. She looks over her shoulder at T'Challa, weapon steady, and when she looks back to Bucky, she looks vaguely sheepish.

 

"I apologize, Sergeant," she says, finally lowering her arm and Bucky allows himself to relax slightly. "I did not realize that you would react that way to being touched."

 

"You surprised me," Bucky tells her. His voice is hoarse from disuse, but he can speak. He must not have been frozen for very long. "I don't like being surprised."

 

"I'll remember that," the girl says. She holds out a hand and Bucky tentatively takes it, unsure if this little slip of a thing is strong enough to help him off the floor. He's seen his x-rays; his shoulder and spine are both reinforced with metal to support the weight of his arm, and he's heavy as fuck.

 

It's a day of surprises, though, as the girl gets him to his feet and then settled on the hospital bed with little more than a grunt on either of their parts. 

 

Quick, strong, guarding the king from an amnesiac assassin. She must be Dora Milaje. He didn’t realize they started this young. He narrows his eyes. The Red Room started their training younger than this, but they were Hydra at their core. 

 

T'Challa steps forward and grasps Bucky's hand. "Sergeant, I would like to introduce you to Shuri, Crown Princess of Wakanda and head of the royal research and development labs." Bucky glances at the girl, who bows her head slightly, suddenly incredibly regal. "She is leading the team that will be dismantling your trigger words."

 

So not a Dora Milaje then, at least not officially, but Bucky stands by his assessment. Training is training, and this girl was definitely trained by her royal guard. 

 

“So you really think you can fix me?” Bucky asks, looking between the king and his sister. 

 

“Oh, definitely,” Shuri tells him. “I specialize in fixing broken white boys. Just last week, I repaired a CIA agent’s perforated spinal column.”

 

Bucky doesn’t know what to say to that, so he falls back on silence. It’s awkward. 

 

“Anyway,” Shuri continues after a moment, “I started working with our neurosurgeons weeks ago, but we had to postpone waking you due to an attempted coup. I do apologize for that. I had wanted to have you settled well before now.”

 

Bucky takes a second to process this before he asks, “So how long was I out?” 

 

“Twenty-six days,” T’Challa answers. 

 

Bucky stares at him. Stares at Shuri. Back to T’Challa. 

 

“You’re apologizing for leaving me on ice for less than a month?” he clarifies. 

 

“Yes,” Shuri confirms.

 

Bucky laughs in her face. 

 

It feels strange, foreign. He can’t really remember the last time he laughed. Even to his own ears, he sounds deranged. 

 

“May I ask,” T’Challa says delicately once Bucky has exhausted his hysteria, “what you find so funny about your situation?”

 

“I was never supposed to wake up again. Hydra broke me and there’s no way to fix it and I was supposed to stay in cold storage until the end of time.”

 

“I do not believe in brokenness that complete,” T’Challa says. “There is always a solution, whether it is easy to find or not.”

 

Tears sting at the backs of Bucky’s eyes. This man thought Bucky had killed his father, had tried to kill Bucky himself, and now he’s using his considerable influence and power to try to fix him. It’s unbelievable. 

 

“Also, I’m really smart,” Shuri says with a grin. “I refuse to let an unsolvable problem exist.”

 

Bucky blinks and laughs again. 

 

“Well then, what are we waiting for?”

 

***

 

He wakes up. 

 

The village kids are loud, playing games and daring each other to wake him. At least that’s what he thinks is going on. His Xhosa is practically nonexistent, but brash children are the same no matter where you go. 

 

They’ve started calling him White Wolf, which may or may not be making fun of his pale complexion , but he still thinks he likes it. It’s nice to have a nickname that isn’t a code name. 

 

Bucky doesn’t count as a nickname. Never in his life has he gone by James, except when in trouble with his mother or his teachers. Bucky is his name, full stop. 

 

His name is Bucky. 

 

_ He  _ is Bucky. 

 

The flap of his hut shifts, one of the kids having pressed against it, and there’s a peel of shrieking laughter as the children run away, calling out something about the Jabari. 

 

He finally drags himself from his cot. Shuri is supposed to be coming by this morning and he doesn’t want to hear her mocking if she finds him still in bed. She’s still going on about the last time she found him that way. 

 

He brushes his hair, splashes some water on his face, brushes his teeth. There isn’t a mirror in his hut, so he can’t tell if the circles under his eyes have faded any in the time he’s been in the village. 

 

He wraps a strip of blue cloth, already pre-knotted thanks to the elderly laundress who helps him out sometimes, around the stub of his arm. The villagers have seen it and no one has mentioned it, but he still feels self conscious about the black cap against his lily white shoulder. 

 

There is a knock at the wall near the door opening. The knock is firm, but comes from down low, so Bucky is already looking down at the little girl outside when he pushes aside the fabric. 

 

“Do you need something?” he asks in his halting Xhosa. Shuri mocks him mercilessly for his accent, but he thinks he’s doing pretty good for having never spoken an African language before. 

 

The girl, Nobomi he thinks her name is, holds up a small brush with brightly colored elastics wrapped around the handle. “May I braid your hair?” she asks. 

 

This isn’t the first time a child has asked to play with his hair. It’s so different from their own that he can’t fault them their curiosity, but he almost always has denied their requests.

 

“A braid might not stay,” he tells her. “My hair is slippery.”

 

“Then I can do something else,” Nobomi says, not backing down like other children have at this point. “May I, please?”

 

And just like that, Bucky caves. He finds himself in short order seated on a log near the river with Nobomi standing behind him, gently brushing his hair. 

 

_ If only Stark and Ross could see me now,  _ he thinks.  _ The Winter Soldier having his hair brushed by a little girl.  _

 

Nobomi tries a braid but the strands slip apart like Bucky had predicted. In the end, she takes half his hair and twists it into a bun at the back of his head, leaving the rest of it down. 

 

She pats his shoulder when she’s all done, thanks him, and runs off giggling towards her friends who have been watching from a stand of trees not far away. 

 

Bucky stays where he is, watching the river and the fish within and trying not to think of anything. 

 

He knows when Shuri arrives, can feel her watching him long before she appears at his side. 

 

“Good morning, Sergeant Barnes.”

 

“Bucky,” he corrects her gently. They’ve had this conversation before but she persists in using his rank instead of his name and Bucky has learned that no one, save possibly Steve Rogers, can outstubborn Shuri. 

 

“How are you feeling?”

 

“Good.” And it’s true. He’s been sleeping and eating regularly and the pain from his shoulder is mostly just a dull ache now. His mind is his own and that’s all down to Shuri. “Thank you.”

 

That finally gets Shuri to smile. "Come," she says, patting him on the arm as she steps past him back towards his hut, back towards his  _ home _ . "You still have much to learn."

 

He follows her after a moment, half of a smile on his face. He's come far these past few weeks, has much further yet to go, but he's not afraid anymore.

 

And isn't that just a kick in the pants.

 

***

 

He wakes up.

 

It's going to be hot today, hotter than usual he can already tell, not that there's much he can do about it. His little house doesn't have any sort of air conditioning, not that he could stay inside all day even if he wanted to. The animals need tending to, he has various chores to do around the farm. He doesn't have much time for sitting idle. 

 

He dresses as well as he can for the heat, which really just means he puts on a shirt with both sleeves ripped off instead of the just the one. He wishes there was some easy way to get his hair off of his neck, but he can't exactly pull off a ponytail with only one hand. 

 

It's times like this he misses moving out of the village, away from the neighbors that he could always count on to help him with the little things that are impossible to do without two hands. 

 

Not that he could stay, not after T'Challa had opened up the borders. Aside from the capital, the Border Tribe were dealing with the most visitors; it would be dangerous for everyone if he was seen among them. At least Nobomi and her friends were able to make it out to the farm every week or so to harass him and his goats. 

 

He's worked up quite the sweat and is halfway through chopping up fire for his stove when he sees T'Challa and General Okoye cresting the hill at the edge of his farm. A handful of King's Guards are behind them, lugging a case with them.

 

Bucky sets down his axe, takes a deep breath, lets the tension in his shoulders flow out with his exhale. He wants very much to run away, to hide from whatever fight T'Challa has come to call him to, but he can't. He's never been able to walk away from a fight, and he doubts he ever will.

 

He takes another deep breath, but he knows he can't stall forever. He steps over to where the Guard has placed the case, looks down at the beautifully crafted arm. Shuri outdid herself with it, black and gold and wonderfully articulated. Bucky's sure it'll work even better than his last arm every did.

 

He doesn't want it, has never wanted it. He can live without a second arm and that's what he's been doing, but he's never fought without it. He'd childishly though that if he never accepted a new arm, then he'd never have to fight again. But T'Challa needs him and who is Bucky to say no to the man who's given him so much?

 

"Where's the fight?" he asks, finally taking his eyes away from the arm.

 

"On its way," T'Challa answers.

 

Bucky nods. "Help me get this thing on?"

 

***

 

He wakes up. 

 

“Steve?”

 

And there's Steve, laughing and crying and getting snot all over Bucky's chest.

 

"What the hell is wrong with you? Who died?"

 

Steve just laughs harder, cries more, gets an obscene amount of snot on Bucky's shirt, and that's when Bucky remembers.

 

He drops his head back and he realizes that he's on the ground, in the middle of the jungle, right where he'd been standing when Thanos had disappeared through his freaky portal.

 

Part of him desperately wants to drag the entire story out of Steve, but part of him just wants to revel in fact that he's alive. Still? Again? Whichever it is, he's alive and he's going to enjoy it.

 

Even if that means dealing with all of Steve's snot.

  
  


_.end _

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first thing I've written and posted for ages, so apologies for any errors.


End file.
